Biography|Bengt Haak — The Regeringsgatan Office Where a Lawyer Became VD

People treat the 1977 appointment as a contractor promoting a site man.

The man the board named was the company's former counsel and finance director.

Haak joined AB Skånska Cementgjuteriet in 1964 as ekonomidirektör.

Three years later he was deputy managing director.

Sveriges handelskalender for 1971 already lists him in the group leadership, under verkställande direktör Ulf Widerström, with the parent company's published address at Regeringsgatan 107, Stockholm 40.

In 1977 he succeeded Widerström as verkställande direktör.

Vem är det, compiled while he held the job, prints the short form: VD sed 77.

The Swedish Wikipedia list of Skanska chiefs, drawn from Wikidata, gives the same span: 1977 to 1981.

The street is not a guess.

On the same block the firm designed and built Höjden 14 at Regeringsgatan 103 between 1971 and 1974, with its own architects' office signing the drawings.

The building still stands.

A later tenant fit-out turned floors over to Avanza Bank.

A visitor now meets a bank entrance, not a 1970s contractor lobby.

Haak's four years as VD coincided with a shift already under way.

By 1977 foreign work had risen to about 18 percent of turnover, against about 5 percent at the start of the decade.

The Middle East jobs of those years — the Jeddah harbour expansion, hospitals in Oman and Libya, the Al Rasheed hotel in Baghdad — sat on the books while he held the chair.

In 1981 he stepped up to group chief and, in 1983, to chairman of the board.

The lawyer who had arrived to keep the accounts left the daily job having run the parent company.

Photo: I99pema, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons